“It’s nice to feel appreciated.” Irene let her voice express her dry sentiment.
The professor laughed. “Don’t worry about that, my dear. We appreciated you deeply this afternoon.”
“I’m sure that you’ll be appreciating me again, then.”
“You can be sure of that.”
She did not return his smile.
“There is a writing desk in your room. You’ll find pens and paper in the drawer. In the past twenty-four hours, you were tortured in two very different ways. You spent the night lying on a bed of nails. Then your nipple was subjected to extensive electrical shocks this afternoon. Tomorrow, I would like you to write an essay that compares and contrasts your two experiences. Compare them in every possible way and describe your subjective feelings about each experience in as much detail as possible.”
“If you wish.” Irene had little appetite for writing essays. She had written too many as a university student and had never taken any pleasure from it. But she was a slave now, and she could not refuse a direct order from her owner. She could be killed for disobedience. Her life literally depended on writing an acceptable essay.
“Do you type? I can get you a typewriter if you prefer.”
“I can type if you wish.”
“I do. It would make your work easier to read. You’ll have to write your essay by hand tomorrow, but I’ll supply you with a typewriter as soon as I can.”
“Thank you.”
“As well, you will find a variety of books on the subject in the study. I recommend that you familiarize yourself with them.”
“I will.”
“Do you read German?”
“No. Only English, French, and Spanish.”
“Pity. The Germans have some fascinating observations on the subject of torture. Not as different as the Japanese, though. From what I have been able to glean from translations of some of their works, the oriental cultures have a completely different perspective on pain. I’ve thought about learning Japanese to better appreciate their thought processes.”
She had no reply to that, except, “I’ll have a look at your library.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Irene thought about what she might write in her essay. She had no idea what the professor was thinking.
He told her. “A few minutes ago, you told me that you would never like feeling pain. I prefer that you don’t. But it can be done. Carl devised a procedure that he performed on a slave that the university owned. It was not complex. He created an association in the woman’s mind between pain and pleasure by following painful experiences immediately with intensely pleasurable experiences. In fact, the pleasure didn’t just follow the pain, it overlapped the last part of the pain. As the pain was faded out, the pleasure was faded in so that there was no clear division between the pain and the pleasure. It also required beginning with very mild pain and slowly increasing the intensity. It took several months to condition the slave. The result was quite fascinating. In the end, the woman was begging to be tortured. Literally falling to her knees and begging. After the experiment was complete, Carl lost interest and sold her. You know Lady Fern? She thought that the conditioned response was wonderful. Not me. I’ve never wanted to do it to a woman again.”
Irene knew Lady Fern. She was a sadistic lesbian. Irene had long pitied any slave who fell into Lady Fern’s clutches. Just as much as she now pitied anyone who was owned by the professor. “Was the pleasure that Carl administered sexual in nature?”
“No. He implanted electrodes into a part of the woman’s brain called the nucleus accumbens. Stimulating that part of the brain with a mild electrical current induces intense pleasure. It’s probably like sexual pleasure but it’s more powerful and more reliably induced. That was just for the training, though. After a while, the torture became so strongly associated with pleasure that Carl didn’t need to give her brain any stimulation any longer. After he removed the electrodes, she still kept begging to be tortured. I don’t know if the training ever wore off. I should ask Lady Fern some time.”
Irene’s face felt chill. The blood had drained from it as the professor was telling the story. Some fates might be worse than being tortured to death.
Then she realized something else. When a scientist wanted to experiment on a human being, he could buy a labor slave for a modest price – as little as a few hundred plaqs or maybe less if the slave was no longer productive – and perform any kind of procedure that he wished.
Medical students had no reason to dissect cadavers when they could dissect living humans and reveal the internal organs while they were still functioning.
There would be slave kennels in the university. Likely some unfortunate soul had been operated on today and was now a corpse waiting for disposal.
Slavery enabled more horrors than she had ever imagined. She wondered how many other daily atrocities were inflicted on slaves that were never mentioned in the newspapers. Never discussed in polite company.
She put her fork on her plate. “I don’t think that I can eat any more.”
“I understand, my dear. You’ve had a difficult day. You can leave the dishes to me and go to bed now.”
However politely it was phrased, it was still an order from her owner. She stood. “Will you come down and lock me in?”
“Lock you in?” He looked puzzled.
“In the bed of nails.”
He laughed deeply. “You can’t sleep on nail points, can you?”
“No. Not a wink.”
“You do want to sleep tonight, don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“Then go to your room and sleep in a proper bed. You don’t have to sleep on the bed of nails every night. That’s just for special occasions.”
She had been sleeping on hard cots in slave kennels since she had sold herself. Snuggling into a proper bed with fresh sheets and a pillow was such a luxury that she put tomorrow out of her mind and cried herself to sleep from joy.
* * *
“I have your essay.” Irene offered the professor a sheaf of papers.
The professor took the essay from her hand. “I have your typewriter. It’s in the car. I’ll give you the keys and you can fetch it up to your room while I’m cooking dinner.” He hefted the bag of groceries that he was carrying. “We’re having spaghetti with caesar salad and garlic bread tonight. A simple meal because I don’t feel like cooking anything elaborate after teaching for most of the day. I have back-to-back lectures on Wednesdays.”
Irene looked down at her naked body.
“Dress before you go outside,” he said. “We can’t scandalize the neighbors. I already generate all the scandal that I can handle. You have to dress for dinner anyway. You should dress in the morning. I don’t expect you to be nude all day when you’re inside. I know that most slaves are, but we’re non-conformists here. I’ll let you know when I want you nude for specific events.”
“There are only lady’s dresses in my closet.”
“So?”
“I mean, there isn’t a slave’s housedress.”
“So?”
She looked at him helplessly.
He stared back at her, his face a question.
He was a smart man. Highly educated. Surely he understood how the world worked. “I can’t wear a lady’s dress on the street.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be decent.”
“Nude wouldn’t be decent. A lady’s dress covers your body better than a slave’s housedress. They’re flimsy things that reveal more of the form underneath than they hide.”
“But I’m not a lady. My hair. If I wear it down, then I’ll look like a slave in a lady’s dress. But if I put it up like a lady, then the slave tattoo on the back of my neck will show. And, no matter whether I wear my hair up or down, I’ll still be wearing my collar.”
He sighed. “So many stupid rules in our culture. Your collar looks like a necklace. Nobody will look at it closely enough to see the insc
ription.” The words, Slave Irene, were inscribed all around the gold choker. “As for your hair, wear it down. Everybody will wonder if you’re really a slave or an adventurous lady trying to start a new fashion.”
She had her orders and she would obey, but she knew that it wouldn’t turn out well. No lady would ever be adventurous enough to wear her hair down like a slave. Her only hope was that she would be outside so briefly that nobody would notice.
He set her essay on an end table and then fished his car keys out of his pocket. “You know which car is mine?”
“I rode in it from Lord Snow’s manor after you won me. It’s a silver Imperial Cruiser.”
“Right. It’s parked on the street a little ways down the block. The typewriter is in the trunk.”
She didn’t bother with a camisole, panties, or stockings. She threw the blue dress on, left her hair hanging freely down her back, and slipped her bare feet into a pair of shoes. As soon as she stepped out the studio door onto the street, she felt exposed. It was wrong for a slave to be seen in public in a lady’s dress with her hair down. Simply wrong.
And she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
There was almost no traffic in this neighborhood, but almost doesn’t mean none. The professor’s Imperial Cruiser was parked half a block away. Walking there took enough time for a couple of cars to pass her. They all slowed to take a look at her.
Then one of the passing cars stopped abruptly next to her. She glanced at it. Ten years old with rust spots and patches on the body, it was not a gentleman’s car.
A young man, maybe twenty, jumped out of the passenger door. “What do we have here?”
She ignored him and kept walking toward the professor’s car.
“Hey, slave, I’m talking to you. You are a slave, right?”
Now he was standing on the sidewalk behind her.
Another young man, this one with ginger hair was climbing out of the driver’s side.
She couldn’t outrun them and was too far from the professor’s front door to make it back to safety, so she turned to the man behind her and said, “What do you want?”
“I want a lot. An awful lot. And I want it bad.”
The man was dressed in jeans and a dirty tee shirt. His black hair was greasy and his cheeks were erupting with acne. He had the swagger of a street tough, full of bravado when confronting an unarmed woman. But she suspected that he would be just as bold if threatened by a cop or one of his peers. He wasn’t like the gentlemen that she knew so well. He was a dangerous young man of the streets.
But even dangerous youths knew better than to interfere with a slave on an errand, lest they risk being arrested, tried, and adjudicated into slavery themselves.
“You won’t get it from me. I’m on an errand for my owner,” she said. “He’ll be looking for me if I don’t get back on time.”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You don’t look like a slave on an errand. You’re pretending to be a lady. Maybe you’re trying to escape from your owner. Maybe there’ll be a nice fat reward if we take you back.”
“I’m dressed exactly as my owner commanded. Now stand aside and let me pass.”
The man behind her grabbed her long hair in a fist and pulled it aside. “You have a tattoo. You’re a slave.”
“Yes. I am a slave.”
“So what’s this?” She felt him fingering her gold collar at the nape of her neck.
“A collar.”
“Like a dog collar?”
“Yes.”
“I never saw a slave wearing a dog collar before. Is that real gold?”
She didn’t like having a conversation with a man that she couldn’t see so she turned around to look at him, pulling her hair out of his fist with the motion.
“They didn’t tell me. I assume that it is.”
“Take it off so I can have a good look.”
“I can’t. It’s fastened permanently. It would have to be cut off.”
“Don’t that beat all,” the first man, who was now behind her, said. “You got to wear a collar around your neck for the rest of your life.”
“Unless my owner decides to cut it off. A slave does what her owner says.”
“How about you do what I say?”
“You don’t own me.”
“I could buy you.” He took a battered wallet out of his pocket and fingered a few bills that were folded inside. “How much do you think you’re worth?”
“I was sold at auction for a hundred thousand plaquettes sterling.”
“I don’t think you’re worth that much. You’re a pretty thing, but not a hundred-thousand pretty. How about fifteen? You think I could buy you for fifteen?”
“Thousand?”
“No. Fifteen plaquettes.” He waved a five and a ten under her nose.
The other tough stepped around in front of her and flicked a knife open. He put it to her face and said, “We can make your owner an offer that he can’t refuse. Fifteen plaqs and his life in exchange for you. You think he’ll go for that?”
“I think that you’d spend the rest of your short life working twenty hours a day as a labor slave and getting whipped bloody every time you stop to take a shit. I’ve been whipped. You wouldn’t like it. It hurts a lot.”
“Tell you what. How about if we just rent you for a little while? You can have the fifteen for a couple of blowjobs. That pouty little mouth of yours looks like it gives great blowjobs. I bet you’ve given hundreds of blowjobs to hundreds of gentlemen.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
The young man scowled. “What’s the matter? Aren’t we good enough for you? Only the high and mighty get to use your pretty little mouth? Maybe we ought to shove you down on your knees and show you that our dicks are as big as any gentleman’s.”
“I can promise you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“If I get your dick between my teeth, I’m going to bite it off, chew it up, and swallow it. You’ll be one dickless labor slave.”
“I ought to cut you for even thinking that.” The man pressed the point of his knife lightly against her cheek.
She shrugged. “I’ve been caned bloody. I’ve been tortured for hours with electric shocks. I’ve been forced to lie on a bed of nails all night long. There’s nothing that you can do to me now that will hurt as much as what my owner will be doing to me this evening and tomorrow and the day after. If you kill me, you’ll save me from a life of torture. If you don’t kill me, the scars that you leave will reduce my value and my owner will take that out of your hide tenfold.”
“Only if he catches us.”
“They always catch people who damage slaves. A dozen people have already seen you talking to me. There are people watching you from their windows right now, wondering why you’ve got a knife pressed to my face. They probably already called the police.”
The youth withdrew his knife from her face, folded it in a smooth motion, and slipped it back into his pocket.
The two young men looked at each other, and then back at her. They had a tiger by the tail. They couldn’t leave without getting something, but they didn’t want to spend years in prison. Or be sold into slavery themselves.
The black-haired man said, “Tell you what. Unbutton that dress and show us your boobs and we’ll be on our way.”
“I’ll go you one better,” she said. “How about I lift my skirt instead and show you a cunt that you’ll never get to fuck?”
Both men’s eyes grew round. “Sure.”
She hadn’t bothered with panties when she dressed. She bent over, grabbed the hem of her skirt, and raised it to her waist to give the two men an eyeful of her bald pussy. “That, gentlemen, is a hundred-thousand plaq cunt. Eat your hearts out.” She dropped her skirt. “Now, you better get out of here before the cops arrive.”
The two men sauntered away, trying to look casual, but not wasting any time getting back to their car. They melted rubber into the pavement when they sque
aled away.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
It was the damned dress. If she’d been wearing the standard slave’s housedress, they never would have dared bother her. It was the blue dress with the long full skirt and tailored bodice that made her look vulnerable.
People had been watching from the windows. When she began walking toward the professor’s car again, a woman screeched at her from a second story window. “Shameless slut!”
She pretty much agreed with the woman’s sentiment. But she was a slave under orders. There was nothing that she could do except be the best, most shameless slut possible.
The professor had been busy in the kitchen. He had no idea that it had taken her so long to fetch the typewriter from his car.
“Can I help cook?” she asked.
“No, my dear. I do the cooking. I find it therapeutic. You can clean up after the meal.” He sliced a baguette from end to end; slathered with a mixture of butter, minced garlic, and grated Parmesan cheese; and popped into the oven. “Dinner will be ready in five minutes if you need to freshen up first.”
Over dinner, she asked if she could have a standard slave’s housedress.
“Why would you need one? Aren’t the dresses that I gave you nicer?”
The Fine Art of Torture (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 3) Page 4